


Four Headcanons

by A_Candle_For_Sherlock



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Arthur Conan Doyle Canon References, Character Study, F/F, Gen, M/M, Tumblr Prompt, backstories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-24 08:10:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17097032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Candle_For_Sherlock/pseuds/A_Candle_For_Sherlock
Summary: Four headcanons for each character requested! Realistic, silly, sad, and anti-canonical.





	1. Inspector Lestrade

**Author's Note:**

> 1-3 are Victorian, 4 is BBC Sherlock.

1\. Lestrade grew up in the tenements in North Kensington. He may not be brilliant at his job, but he is thankful to have it; to apply a little daily pressure that could make the city, his city, tip further toward the light and away from the darkness he knows, the father-abandoned sons trying to keep a step ahead of callous landlords and unscrupulous shift supervisors, the girls who find a place in a “good” home only to find out there is hunger belowstairs and beatings above, the women taking in work from rich homes that will find any excuse to short their pay. He knows he can’t redeem London from its sins, but he can hold one position of power in it with decency.

2\. Lestrade and Gregson are married. They started bickering on the job when they were falling in love off-hours, to cover their growing fondness, and now the feigned rivalry is so well-established that it’s become a form of flirtation for them. They’re constantly trying to think of pettier behavior to entertain the other, and they giggle about it endlessly at home.

3\. The impetus for Lestrade’s career was the loss of his first love, a boy who was conscripted by a street gang when they were both fifteen and died in the middle of a house robbery six months later at the hand of a callous policeman called to the scene. Lestrade determined to run a Yard trained to value every life lived within its jurisdiction, however powerless its owner.

4\. Lestrade helped trace the remaining members of Moriarty’s faction within London after Reichenbach, and received messages from Holmes to pass to Watson from time to time. He was well aware of the significance of the Moran case when it all came to a head–had notified Holmes by wire as soon as the murder happened, and could not have asked for anything better than the conclusion of it all, the three of them arresting the man together in the empty house, and Holmes safe at Watson’s side again.


	2. Mary Morstan

1\. She’s as good a writer as Watson, and a wider reader; but neither fiction nor adventure inspire her muse. She focuses on political and social issues; in women’s magazines, under her own name, in national newspapers using a pseudonym, to begin with. She spends a considerable amount of time going out with John to the hospitals, the slums, and the working districts, though, to better learn what needs to be done, and then follows up her articles on conditions there with personal involvement in several free schools and ladies’ aid societies; and in the end she earns enough social capital through her activism that she’s able to publish anywhere under her own name.

2\. Her favorite memory is the six months she spent disguised as a boy at fifteen, touring with a traveling circus and caring for the elephants. She’s never told anyone but her lover Catherine about it; she took a position as a nurse on her return and forged a letter of recommendation from the previous employer she’d invented.

3\. She’s an orphan in the legal sense–disinherited and homeless–but not literally: her father died, but her mother lives; only she refuses anything to do with Mary, since Mary refused to get married to the tradesman Mary’s mother chose for her. He would have made the family financially secure again, but Mary is a lesbian and too independent and idealistic to marry a man she doesn't like just because she was told to.

4\. She confided in John immediately about her love affair with Catherine, and the way the treasure would have set them free to live together independently. When the treasure proves empty, John offers to marry her and take Catherine on as a live-in friend; it would take him away from Holmes, who he’s pining after silently and hopelessly, and it would give Mary and Catherine the joy he thinks he can’t have.


	3. Mycroft Holmes

1\. He’s never been outside England. He was twenty when their father made his money, on a sale of old family lands suddenly and unexpectedly inherited, and by then he was well settled in London and had no desire to break up his quiet routine for a week on the beaches of southern Spain. Their singular childhood vacation (a hiking tour of Scotland) had traumatized him so deeply (between the cold weather, the too-interested sheep, the eternal heather which irritated his allergies terribly, and the atrocious food) that he never traveled again.

2\. Sherlock brings him back a harmonica from Germany after the Hiatus, and Mycroft becomes quite good at playing it. He sits by the fire at night and teaches himself new songs on it after he’s finished his reports from various subordinates, before his nine o’clock bedtime. He finds the sound of the instrument relaxing.

3\. After Sherlock was cut off by their father for kissing Victor Trevor at his family home, and getting caught by the Trevor matriarch (who felt the need to tell the Holmeses, so they could further humiliate Sherlock and ensure he never came round again), Mycroft cut himself out of the family, too, voluntarily. Neither of them ever saw their father again. (Their mother had died when they were quite young.)

4\. Mycroft’s first task post-Reichenbach was to inform Watson immediately what had really happened. He sent Watson a telegram at Brussels, but it missed him; in the end he met Watson at the station in London and told him in the cab. At first Sherlock didn’t know how to forgive Mycroft the gap of three days between Reichenbach and London, during which John had believed him dead. But since Mycroft invited Watson over for tea once a week till Sherlock’s return, he was mollified in the end.


	4. Molly Hooper

1\. Molly never thought she had a sense of style. It seemed to come effortlessly to other girls, but whenever she ventured out of the ponytail-trainers-and-jumpers combination she’d worn all her life, she felt pretty but fake and awkward as hell, like an imitation of a grown woman. She liked the colors and textures in her closet, but the style hadn’t changed since her mother had picked her clothes for her in grade school.

Six months after Molly’s started coming to terms with the word “bisexual” a woman walks into her book club with a short cut and chukka boots. She’s got a jumper like Molly’s on, and no more makeup than Molly ever wears to the lab, and something about her scares Molly a little, and something more makes Molly think she’s the best thing she’s ever seen. She gets home and googles “androgynous hair,” which leads to “women in suits,” which leads to a long digression on Cate Blanchett’s IMDb, but at two a.m. she goes to bed with a new Pinterest board full of motorcycle jackets and crew necks and a surprising amount of Tegan and Sarah, and a sense of glowing possibility around her heart.

2\. From the time Jim dated Molly, he had various songs from Glee stuck in his head pretty much constantly. He accidentally sang a line under his breath more than once. He had to shoot a henchman for overhearing him.

3\. Molly’s first love was a college housemate. She was completely blindsided when the friend got engaged (to a loud, annoying boyfriend Molly hadn’t taken seriously), and then on the heels of the news asked Molly to be in the wedding party. Molly braved her way through congratulations and hugs and talk about the ring and the honeymoon and the proposal and possible locations for the hen do, and then locked herself in her room and cried for two hours without being able to explain why, except that things were changing and she didn’t like it. 

She remembers all this quite suddenly when Sherlock shows up at Bart’s asking for help with John’s stag night, and that’s the moment a lot of things start becoming clear to Molly.

4\. When Sherlock asks her to say she loves him, she says, “Obviously, idiot,” and hangs up, because by that time she’s head over heels for Stella Hopkins and the way she loves Sherlock has simmered down into a exasperated but tender kind of sisterly feeling they’re both far more comfortable with.


End file.
